


ice bath

by somekindofseizure



Series: WTID Supplemental Reading [12]
Category: The Fall (TV 2013), The X-Files
Genre: Bathtub Sex, F/F, Ice, WTID
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 13:17:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14165655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure
Summary: For my anon who asked for WTID-hiatus Stella/Scully.





	ice bath

It is a strange turn of events that brings Stella Gibson to a suburban curb some Sunday-off in April with an aloof hunch in her shoulders, arms crossed tight over her breasts, eyes gently squinting at this part of London she’d barely consider London, her body language tuned as though to remind herself she doesn’t belong. The crowd is made of children with their hands held out like signposts, begging to be slapped by people whizzing or limping by, adults with painted faces hold pieces of cardboard overhead, urgings of encouragement across their signs and on their lips so trite it turns Stella’s stomach. It smells of sweat (the ammonia kind, Scully says, from burning muscle) and yellow sports drink (not red or orange, Scully says, because they can be mistaken for blood in the urine and not the other flavors because everyone hates them).

She doesn’t understand any of this, any of these people with numbers pinned to their vests, not the strangers and not even the one she knows intimately. The fact that she barely knows where she is underscores just how unreasonable a distance twenty-six point-two miles encompasses. Forty-two point-one kilometers, she said at one point, and Scully argued since she’s the one running it, it’ll be her unit of measurement thank you very much.

Sounded kind of good at first, upon Scully’s first announcement. The London Marathon would be as good an excuse as any to spend a weekend together. Then an unforgiving sixteen-week training schedule had its way with her friend on the other side of the Atlantic, planting nasty ideas like a mean schoolgirl, passing along bits of bad news through Scully’s text messages and phone calls and emails. First of all, there would be no wine (dehydration), certainly no cigarettes (lung capacity). Then, there would be only healthy foods leading up to the day, and afterward probably no food at all because she’d have lost her appetite (glycogen depletion). She wouldn’t be able to go shopping before (would tire her legs out) or after (more leg stuff).

And so far, it’s been as dreary as Scully warned. Five o’clock this morning Scully was up putting lights on as though she’d earned them, bounding from bed to kitchen with nervous energy louder than a night-train whistle, putting coffee on as Stella sat and sulked with a tightly bound black silk robe and crossed legs, slouching over a stale muffin. She was only to have half a cup, she’d told Stella. Not a drop more. Stella deliberately ignored the pour, unable on so little sleep to give a fuck how much coffee Scully did or didn’t drink.

“Do you know why people get the runs running long races?” Scully asked, placing her coffee cup - without outside discipline - in the sink at exactly the halfway mark. She took a bite of peanut-buttered bread.

“Runs?”

“Diarrhea. Blood stops flowing to any organs that aren’t completely necessary in order to keep the necessary ones going.”

“Perhaps you should consider your life choices if digestion has become unnecessary.”

Scully flicked the edge of Stella’s robe off her knee on her way to her table full of gear without even managing to trigger the tiniest thought of sex. Instead, Stella thought about not coming. She’d stay home and wait, make one of Scully’s stupid protein shakes and have it ready and that would be duty-enough. The point of not having real relationships was not to have to do real relationship things, and for a few minutes, today seemed like the perfect day to do it.

But five minutes later, Scully’s voice came expectant as a kid’s on her first day of school. She tipped her chin up as she bent to wield shoelaces like dueling swords at one another. Stella sighed. What adult could still look at people that way?

“You remember the two spots? The one in the middle, one at the end, with the car? Don’t forget.”

“I won’t forget.”

“Don’t forget the car, that’s the most important thing,” Scully joked and Stella had to smile. If Scully could laugh about what she was about to spend her day doing, certainly Stella could postpone her foul mood until she was standing alone in the petty chill, waiting for a five second view of someone she could watch in comfort all night long. 

Now Stella’s time has come and she’s having trouble summoning the cynicism she stored up for this moment full of over-eager strangers. She’s bored, up to her ears in an ambivalent grey spring day, precipitation so precariously held-off that if you snapped your fingers, it would pour. Warm and cool air swirl like cake mix, dry and wet ingredients pushing up against one another without making one. She unwraps her scarf, re-wraps it, tries to make sense of it all. She’s home. Scully’s here. She’s happy.

Scully comes by with a lazy smile – it’s mile twelve or so, and Stella has to squelch the urge to offer her a ride. She looks a little tired maybe, but healthy and at-ease, small red wave of hair flapping at her neck as humidity pricks the baby hairs around her face. Stella feels mildly embarrassed as she realizes she doesn’t know what to do in such a moment, that she hasn’t made any plans. She doesn’t shout, doesn’t cheer or tease, doesn’t reach out like the children do. She just lets Scully’s eyes find her and holds them, feels such a rush of joy in that instant, such a sudden awareness of how much identically positive intention has been funneled into this one dreary speck of London this morning by so many different people, that tears burn her eyes.

Scully is no longer smiling by the second meeting point. She doesn’t so much as chuckle when Stella jokes she left the car at home, and she’s practically growling by the time Stella turns the key in the front door. All of this is vaguely validating, the kind of reaction to four hours of exercise Stella can relate to.

“All right,” Stella says and lets Scully lean on her shoulder to push her shoes off before the door is even shut.

“Sorry about the smell,” Scully grumbles.

“Not at all,” Stella says and what she really means is she likes it, that it has the smell of rabid new-person sex to her. But she’s trying to co-operate here. Scully limps up the stairs with a voice like a rusty doorknob, leaving a path of sweaty sock and Stella goes to the kitchen.

“Is your toe bleeding?” Stella asks in horror, following a few slow steps behind with a giant bag of ice, holding the hole she pried open with her fingers shut.

“Nail fell off,” Scully snaps.

“No one made you do this, you know.”

“Fuck off.” 

Stella grins. 

“With your ice?”

But Stella doesn’t make her answer. She runs the bathtub, cold first, and then on instinct, the hot, but stops herself.

“Do you know why it’s twenty-six point-two?” Scully asks as she undresses. Socks squirreled past her ankle bones with a grimace, leggings peeled and carefully widened around the toe situation. The accusatory edge in her voice gets sharper.

“It’s arbitrary,” Stella offers. It has all seemed arbitrary, the charts within charts within charts. Nonsense at every glimpse as far as she could tell, but she needs only pay the littlest bit of attention to see the peace it gives elsewhere; math and science applied in equal measure to certain results. The sureness of it sets Scully free.

“Tell me why it’s twenty-six point-two,” she corrects accordingly, and finds herself curious as soon as she does. Every day, every week of training has been like its own experiment, and all have borne findings of fact. Sexy and interesting bits like kinesthetic theory and biology, duller bits to do with specific types of proprietary sneaker foam. Scully, though crabby and exhausted, is no less eager to share this one. She wiggles out of her sports bra, revealing mauve colored lines beneath each breast. Stella winces and then looks away.

“Everyone thinks it’s the distance from Athens to Marathon. But that distance is only the twenty-six,” Scully says ruefully.

“Mm. Who gave it the point-two?”

“You. Your people. So the race could end in front of Buckingham Palace.”

“So the Queen could see the finish.”

“Yes.”

“Queen likes to watch, what can I tell you?”

“‘They’ve been running twenty six miles, what’s another point-two,’ right?”

“Probably would’ve said forty-two kilometers if we’re talking about any Queen of England.”

Stella tries not to look at Scully’s ass, tries not to notice how fine it is on the outside, to instead remind herself how much it probably hurts on the inside. Scully is after sixteen weeks plus four hours very hard in certain places and very softly swollen in others, and she’s peachy salivating cream all over.

Stella takes a breath, puts her hand in the stream of water - so cold she’d hesitate just to splash it on her face for a second, much less sit in it naked for fifteen minutes. It seems as punishing or more so than the run itself, she almost says, but she takes one look at Scully’s marks and chafes, her slightly knobby joints and she knows it’s necessary. (Icing is the number one anti-inflammatory in the world).

Scully looks at the bath and grimaces, shoulders bracing around her ears. Stella softens in sympathy. How fucked up humans are, she thinks, that our idea of fun turns grave displeasure into palliative necessity.

“You should get in first, I think,” Stella suggests. “I’ll put the ice in once you’re used to it.”

“I don’t think I’m going to get used to it.”

She hesitates and Stella can see that she’s halfway abandoned good medical doctor sense, edging toward the decision to skip the bath altogether.

“It might feel good,” she lies.

“What’s the coldest water you’ve ever been in?”

“Twenty degrees?”

Scully looks rather impressed, encouraged. Fahrenheit, Stella realizes Scully misunderstood, but holds her tongue and offers her hand.

Scully takes it, fingers radiator-hot and trembling with the energy of still-burning fuel, an appliance mistakenly left on for hours past use. She leans her weight on Stella completely as she steps in with heavy, still slightly bloody feet, holding her breath, and then sighing it out slowly to sit. She closes her eyes, pants as the water climbs the edges of her breasts, knees, shoulders.

“Are you okay?” Stella asks.

She nods too quickly for it to be convincing, but Stella starts to pour the ice in anyway. Best to get it over with, she thinks, glancing at the time. The ceramic echoes as the chips make contact, and the surface bounces with punishing prisms that distort and refract their promise to heal.

When Scully finally opens her eyes, Stella is staring, marveling really. She never doubted for a moment that Scully would do or finish the race, but she’d doubted the likelihood of this ice bath from the beginning. 

“Do you think it’s enough ice?” Scully wonders.

“I don’t know. I have about a dozen more downstairs that I saved for cocktails if you must have them.”

Scully spares as much of a smile as she can under the circumstances, takes a handful of cubes and holds them at one hip. It sounds like a hollow tunnel beneath a stream when she moves, the echo of pipes at a construction site. Tap water in both its solid and liquid state ripples and tumbles, rolling and roiling Scully’s pale form, an ocean pushing silt over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, shrinking and shaping her skin like a sandstone formation, carving from what was once soft and free painfully pointed pink-tipped mountains.

“Your body is…” Stella says. 

“A trainwreck, I know.”

“No. Well, yes, but I was referring to the ah, results of your labors.”

Scully half-opens one eye and aims it in suspicion at Stella. Stella shrugs her overly soft purple-grey sweatshirt in response. It hangs a bit off her shoulder when she rights her posture.

“You look good,” she says, understating the record.

“Don’t,” Scully warns. “I can’t even move.”

“As if that were a deterrent in this house.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“I’m not the one sitting here with a bleeding nail-less toe in a tub of freezing water.”

Scully quietly laughs.

“I dare you to get in here and try it.”

Stella may not see the merits of running races but she can pull her weight in sexual dares. She reaches over to the sink, clips her hair back and Scully’s eyes snap open.

“Really,” Scully says.

Stella contemplates her next step. There are a few ways to get into any body of water and this one is no different. At the pool, she is strictly the get in without thinking type, and the pool doesn’t even have any ice in it. So here, she remains dressed, withholding the time she’d need to second-guess herself, and quick one-foot-two-feet, cha-chas in, lets the water tug the hem of her jeans and comes to her knees with an H- shaped hiss. The tub groans as she crawls up to position herself over Scully’s body. Her wrists ache as they bend into the cold.

“Really,” Stella whispers back belatedly. “You friendly little sado-masochist.” 

She slithers into the space between Scully’s legs, dropping her hips until she’s submerged up to the button of her jeans, leaving herself dry at a three-dimensional diagonal from lower back to tip of the nose, willing suddenly to get wetter still as Scully’s two strong thighs squeeze her like the arms of an octopus.

She wiggles two fingers at Scully’s chest and Scully rises a little, snake to her charmer. Stella lowers her face, opens her mouth wide around the nipple, careful to seal it off skin-to-skin, and licks with a soft-sloping tongue. No pinching, no squeezing, no poking tonight. Scully has sensitive nipples and Stella knows her way around them, but here she is trying to do the trick in reverse, melt and soften the tips with the warmth of her mouth. She breathes through her nose and the air off Scully’s chest is like human freezer burn – ripe-flavored body left open, frosted over.

“This is crazy,” Scully sighs, but she’s shifting herself subtly up into Stella’s soaked jeans.

“No crazier than anything else you’ve done today.”

Stella’s hand makes its way up Scully’s inner thigh. She moves her mouth to Scully’s ear, hiding her nose in the warm crevasse between the cartilage and the damp red start of a ponytail that has seen more of London than she has.

“Will blood have returned to this organ yet?” she asks and she’s almost serious, doesn’t want to prod around if it’ll be uncomfortable, but Scully nods slowly, this time very convincingly, and more convincing still is the near-tropical climate Stella’s finger finds inside Scully’s body. Seventy degrees warmer in any unit of measurement and wetter than the bathwater. She wants to stay there, put her whole hand, fuck it, her whole arm in there, but there’s a time and place for everything and this, if no other, is a time for efficiency. 

The sounds are deafening, the many notes water can strike in a room as acoustically varied as an old bathroom. And through the clapping low waves, the drips over the side and the knuckling of ice cubes is Scully’s ebbing low moan. True to her word, she barely moves, contributes only her beauty and one half-hearted attempt to put a hand up Stella’s shirt, which she gives up when the cling and pulse of angry cold fabric tangles her path. Water sloshes over the sides of the tub, cubes figure skating in pairs across the tile as Stella makes vigorous little circles, runs the tiny track around Scully’s clitoris on the balls of her fingers. 

It happens as quickly as Stella intended. A rush of shaky and unlikely heat beneath her as Scully takes Stella’s shirt in a fist and yanks it forward, holding Stella close against her body like a life raft, lips turning almost as blue as her eyes. This has to be now.

“Stella,” Scully begs, gasps, clinging with one desperate arm to the edge of the bathtub as though it were the up-end of the Titanic. Stella grits her jaw to keep it from chattering, lowers herself still, to make as much contact as possible. A single ice cube crackles from the heat of their joined stomachs as it slides out from between them.

“Dana,” Stella breathes through tight teeth, watching Scully’s eyes roll, focusing through the cold discomfort on the tiny sticky oven-treat lick of fire beneath her fingers. “Be a sport and finish for the Queen.”


End file.
